Until the Spring
by Bogglocity
Summary: The forest is dark, and deep, and doesn't house the spectres that Nadir is searching for. It isn't empty, all the same. Charoga
1. The Wood

**A/N: Written for a prompt-fill on tumblr, for a trope mash-up between 'Soulmate AU' and 'Survival/Wilderness AU'! Warning for animal death and some suggestive themes.**

* * *

The song is loud in his head.

But there is someone Nadir is meant to be chasing. Someone he knows very well, someone he cares for very well, enough to follow into every country carrying the tiniest inkling of a trail. Enough to disregard the fact that the man was never the one whose song matched his, no matter how often they hummed them to each other with hands clasped a thousand-thousand ages ago. Enough, even, to risk braving a frigid Swedish November in a northern forest with a name impossible for his mouth to form.

Not enough for Nadir to remember that man's name, with his upper arm bleeding in a curtain down his sleeve and his entire body quaking with numb. The sleigh was just behind him, he is sure of it. It was just behind him, but the fall down the jagged slope had shaken snow off of one tree, which had shaken snow off of many trees, until even the one-armed and sweating climb back up proved fruitless for the loss of his tracks and what few faculties the cold had allowed him to keep to that point.

The dark has since fallen, the moon has since set, and he uses his good arm for eyes, as much to keep the branches out of his face as to feel forward. He has given up hope that he will find the trail again, given up hope of finding decent shelter, and the song shrills and echoes between his temples like a desperate, clawing thing trying and failing to keep him gripping to life.

He sees nothing but spots, floating in and out of existence. He feels little but the gumming blood on his arm and the crystals of ice in his beard. And when the light appears through the trees, above the mid-thigh snow, he knows it to be a figment. Still, the song grows louder, and for that, he doesn't quite hear the sound of crunching snow from somewhere beyond the pines. He only hears, amidst the frantic notes as he falls forward into blackness, a distant, hazy woman's shout.

* * *

He wakes to thick, sap-scented heat and a cloud of sheepskin under his naked back, the song faded to its steady, continuous background melody. He wakes, too, to the sleep-bleary ceiling of a ramshackle hut—the inside of a ragged wooden pyramid, longer than it is wide and even then only long enough for a bed. _Two_ beds, he amends when he turns his head, the other separated from the one he lays on by a tiny stretch of floor lined with furs and pine boughs. To one end is an iron stove, crackling with a hearty flame behind the grilled front, the other a door and—a figure.

A young woman, to be precise, perhaps in her twenties, and the song shivers like a bell at the sight of her untucking pale-gold hair from where it had been pinned beneath a mottled grey hat. She lays a basket at the foot of the opposite bed and it seems a ritual, the methodical way she rids herself of patchwork coat, bright red scarf, matching mittens. Her boots are last and heaviest, and she doesn't so much as look his way when she takes them up, pads on thick-stockinged feet to the stove, and sets them down beside where his own sit neglected. She crouches to stoke the fire, so close he can see the reddened shade of cold-kissed cheeks and the dew of melted snowflakes in her eyelashes, even in the low light.

"Miss," he croaks. She starts, he with her, the clang of poker against the stove, the hiss at the twinge of sutures he hadn't realized were lining his arm when he jolts to sit, when she jolts to her feet. The song trembles again when she whips ice-blue eyes to him, wide as though amazed that he is alive.

* * *

She speaks none of his language and he only enough of hers to know numbers and the cardinal directions, but with a fumbling game of charades, he learns that he was unconscious for a little more than a week, and it is more a guess to know he was hypothermic first, and then feverish until he came to. He learns, too, that her name is Christine Daaé, and the syllables of it make the notes in his head trill in a peculiar way that he attributes to the fever shaking from his brain.

He relearns the name of the man he was chasing, _Erik_, because she points to him and states it like a question. He doesn't understand at first, nearly spills the tea of pine needles that she made into his lap in his haste to ask her _where, where is he?_ It isn't until she grabs his arm—grip tight, like she knows the strength in the thrashing of the ill and determined—that he realizes that she doesn't know, only that he must have spoken the name in his ailing.

"Nadir," he corrects with apologetic smile. "Nadir Khan." The song trills again and if he didn't know better, he would say that he saw her brow crease just a hair.

* * *

That first night, after she's plied him with spoonsful of honey and bowls of thin, herbed broth, she sits at the edge of the bed she's lent him. She doesn't look his way just yet, staring across the tiny stretch of floor to her bed as though looking for something in the ecstatic colours of her quilt. She stares until her expressions flick from considering to anger to something else entirely, and at that point she is holding his hand—the song skips a beat, barely noticeable—and the staring turns to him while she brushes a thumb over his knuckle. He squeezes, an instinct—did she hold his hand, when he was sick?—and she squeezes back, and in that little moment, he sees a flash of a knowledge in her face he has had since waking but hasn't yet put to worded thought.

He was left out here to die.

He doesn't have the time to think properly on the fact, to think on the implications of his own mistake or the ill-will of those he paid, of how he will get to the point of no longer being dangerously deep in a Swedish forest—to say nothing of finding Erik—because she squeezes his hand again, tighter this time. With her other hand and a surety that is marked by a bowing mellow of the song, she points to him. She points to the bed beneath him. With an uncurling and splay of her fingers, she mimes something—grass, growth, _spring_.

_You. Here. Spring._

_Stay until the spring._

With a surety he doesn't quite understand himself, and a series of notes that sit odd and heavy and warm, he nods.

* * *

He learns the word for 'soup' first—or perhaps 'stew' or perhaps 'broth'—and the word for 'bread'. He teaches her the same in his tongue while she snips his sutures free. He learns the word for 'shirt' and the word for 'quilt'. These he teaches her too while she shows him how to sew patches into his torn shirt to match those she gives him. He learns the word for 'pine needle' and the word for 'rabbit', and when he finds his legs again and the echoes of the fever stop muzzying him, he learns to find and collect them.

He doesn't ask why she is here, doesn't have the words for it even if he wanted to ask, and all the same, what difference does it make? She is here, and she is patient while he learns to spot the squirrels' caches and tie the knots for the snares, and it is a blessing. It is luck that sees him alive, and something in that luck feels tenfold when she hands him bowls of stewed rabbit and his fingers brush hers for the barest of seconds, roughened and dried by the chill and the fire-heat. The song crackles with the fire in those instants.

* * *

His heart pangs when she first brings out the violin, three weeks after the day he first woke. The case is ragged as the hut, wood dry and splintered in places, dinged and dented in others, but in the tender way of an object aged and well-loved. He isn't used to seeing them in such a state, instead to the pristine upkeep of one belonging to a restless, manic mind—a different sort of love, but love too.

The violin itself is gorgeous despite little bits of wear, stained a dark auburn, with mother-of-pearl set into the neck in scrolls of fanning flowers that shine a pink-gold in the firelight. She holds it in her lap, thumbing the pegs. Though she always has some colour beneath her eyes, it seems deeper now for her looking at it.

"Christine," he says softly. When she looks up, he recognizes the weight of resigned grief in the line of her brow. He holds out a hand and she takes it with no hesitation—he knows now that she held his hand in that feverish week, because it comes too easily to doubt—and with his other, he mimics bowing beside his shoulder. He points to her, then the violin. "Do you play?"

She laughs, a low and weary thing, before she shakes her head. She nods it then toward the bed she's lent him, plucks at the cuff of the shirt she gave him, and says '_Papa_'.

The way she speaks it speaks more than a recounting would and it bruises something between his ribs. She must see it because she twines their fingers, perfect and interlocking, and smiles a smile that dips the dimple in her cheek. He can't help but return it, nor to swirl his thumb in a circle at her wrist—the song stutters.

It lasts only a second before he is back to his mending, she back to her tending. She takes to tuning, and for a moment, he thinks the way she thrums the strings matches with the tune in his head.

* * *

He learns the word for 'fur' and the word for 'bark', and teaches them back to her. With the first, how to skin a rabbit and prepare the hide. With the second, how to find the soft white flesh between pine-bark and wood, and how to bake it into the dark bread that fills their stomachs when they can't eat the rabbit for lack of lard and fear of being ill.

He learns the word for 'light' and the word for 'star', and teaches them back to her. With the first, he learns that it can form ribbons that shimmer and coalesce to turn treetops to dancing, vibrant-edged silhouettes. With the second, that he remembers nights under heat-swaying Persian skies and that they were different, so very different without the clouds of breath that plume into his blurring vision. With both, he learns that she turns her head to hide her tears, and that she leans against him but says nothing when he does the same.

He learns, too, a Swedish folk song while she stokes the fire. With this, he learns that the song in his head can change course to other songs, and that the colour of her lips is peony, the colour of her eyes is winter-sky, the sound of her laughter is addictive. He learns that the burr of a thought in the back of his head that tells him he needs to be searching is prickly, but less when she uses his knee to prop herself to standing.

* * *

He learns the word for 'axe'. This one he doesn't teach back to her because he is too busy shaking from the adrenaline, fingers bloodied for the gashes in her arm where the woken bear had swatted at her and almost, almost did more than just graze. He ignores the stinging in his palm where the axe handle had splintered in his throw, ignores too her quavering, thin-laughing protests—knows them to be protests, by the push of her other hand—when he presses his already rust-stained shirt into her sleeve to quell the bleeding.

Had her arm been turned the other way, had she not the reflexes she had—it doesn't warrant thinking. He stitches her up, practiced himself from more reckless and purposeful violences.

When he is done, he finds the bear again, felled and frozen with axe-head lodged in its skull, and he makes her rest while he cooks them both a meal that fills the hut with the scents of melting fat and berry-fed meat. The song stays frantic all the while, beating against his chest and lodging in his throat, but when she nudges him with her foot and inches forward until their knees press together, it fades quiet.

* * *

It is past midwinter when the firs outside keen and the chill hisses insidious promises beneath the crack of the door. It is past midwinter when he first feels the proper fear of it, this reality of a forest that stretches for an age in all directions with nothing but the snow and the bears and the wolves he hears so far but too close not to stop stiff at the sound. It is past midwinter when he lays awake for the cold that nips at his feet beneath the fur and the quilt.

It is past midwinter, too, when she whispers his name across that tiny distance between their beds.

The firelight is dim, only one log burning at a time until they can reach the wood shelter again, but he can see her face, her eyes, her hair, all spirit-pale against the burnt umber of the fox pelt beneath her head. The song takes on a waltzing rhythm, or a heartbeat rhythm, or some other thing slow and steady while she stares and he stares back. His heart trips at the way a curling lock falls over her face and she pushes it back.

Again when she sits up, stockinged feet touching the furs on the floor. He sees the ripple of goosebumps on her bare arms, her scars dark against the pale, the slightest shiver. He mirrors it with the tiny draft that brushes his neck, and with it he sees now the wordless question in the shift of quilt from her lap.

The answer is obvious.

She is soft against his chest, warm with the scent of bay, thyme, woodsmoke that clings to her hair and the fanning of breath over his lips. She is solid where she tangles her legs with his to keep on the too-small bed, solid beneath the hand he pushes to the small of her back and his arm resting in the dip of her waist. They are still, listening to the wind beat livid snowflakes against the roof of the hut to bury them alive. The solitude is thick around them, held only at arm's length by the press of her forehead to his, by the pull of her inward breath.

"Nadir," hush, hand creeping up his chest. It reaches his jaw, strokes over his beard, up to his temple, into his hair. He shivers and she does the same and the song follows suit. "_Nadir_."

He kisses her to taste his name on her lips. He kisses her to swallow the sigh. He kisses her and she kisses back, and they aren't still anymore. Palms find the places to warm, chests and shoulders and waists. Fingers find the places to trace, sensitive and pulling gasps. Fingers find the crests of hips. Fingers find hems and waistbands and flesh, find the skin seldom touched, find the places hot and pleading and shuddering while lips find necks and jaws.

He learns the word for 'please' and the word for 'yes', and teaches them back to her while the song quickens with the blood in his veins.

* * *

He doesn't learn the word for 'song'. They leave it secret and unspeakable, because he knows the ache of songs mismatching and the sting of rhythms that don't quite meld, and he sees the same in her when she hums some other folk song and hugs that red scarf around her neck with distant memory in her eyes. He doesn't want to know the melodies because in the end, he knows that now he would follow her the way he follows Erik and he doesn't want the pain of knowing that he isn't meant to.

Otherwise, he listens to her sing somber tunes they know while she looks at the hut, or looks at the fire, or looks at the violin with that heavy, weary grief that ages her twenty, thirty years for a fleeting, awful moment. She always turns to him afterward, cradles his face, swallows when he leans into it and tries to make sense of her expression.

She doesn't give him a chance, because she always kisses him next, fiercely tender when she guides his hands to her hips.

* * *

It is mid-March when the snowdrops peek through, delicate and living against the snow. It is mid-March, then, when he decides he must move on.

They've learned many words by now, simple phrases that tangle their tongues but that the other understands even through the stumbling. Enough for her to say she can guide him to the village and help him on his way, and enough for him to have the means to ask her for something she can't give. He doesn't use them.

So they mend, and they stock, and they pack the things they need for the long trip, and the night before they intend to leave, they hold each other and weep in silence while the song trembles weak in the back of his skull.

She brings the violin and he doesn't ask why. She looks back at the hut with tears in her eyes and murmurs something under her breath that he can't hear. He doesn't ask why for this either.

They don't speak at all for the week that passes in travel between the dewy spruces.

* * *

The carriage to Stockholm is ready and she is there, starkly fae-like outside of the insulated fantasy of the wood. He feels a stranger himself, for those few months spent—rugged, ragged, ill-fitted for civilization with the new callouses on his palms and the thickening of his blood.

She holds the violin case slack, those wild winter eyes fixed to him across two steps' distance, and that question is perched on his tongue, light and heavy at once. He can't ask it of her. He shouldn't. He won't.

But pained and pleading, she hums.

He doesn't recognize it at first, in a voice that isn't in the echoes of his own head, but it tickles at the edges of his knowing until it slides into place, effortless and liquid. A harmony that shifts when that in his head shifts, a harmony that lingers when she stops and waits, expectant with knuckles going white on the handle of the violin case.

When he takes the song up himself, she sobs, but with fae face brightened to a grin.

He can't ask it of her, but she answers.

* * *

He learns the word for 'song', because she teaches him when she pulls him into the train car bound for Paris from Le Havre. He teaches it back to her, teaches her the name 'Erik' in earnest, and she says the name with ease.

She knows little of his language, he little of hers, but they each know enough to promise that when they find the man, it will be together. The song, with her singing under her breath to it to the rhythm of the train car's rocking, is lighter than it has ever been.


	2. Until the Winter

**A/N: I didn't expect to write any sort of sequel to 'Until the Spring', but I got a tumblr prompt for 'things you said when you thought i was sleeping' and Charoga, and this fit too well. I'm not sure I'll continue with it, but this was fun to return to.**

* * *

It had only been one winter, but it spins the bustle of Paris into something unbearable. The noise grates in a way the groaning of the firs never did, horses' hooves an unrelenting hammer on Nadir's eardrums when the carriages pass by the window. The white noise of mingled conversation isn't the same as that of the snowflakes collecting on the roof of the hut, the hiss of wind, the crackling of the ice under the brief glow of the bright winter sun.

It drowns out the shared song in his head.

He stares out the window at the summer night, the small hours bringing drunkards who sing their own songs, mournful and wine-loud, bemoaning some great tragedy of love that he can't understand. The French doesn't come as easily to him as the Swedish does, another part of Paris that pushes at him to say he is unwelcome.

He learned the word for 'noise' and the word for 'city' and he taught them back to her, both with stilted tones that said enough of their discomfort to say nothing more of it.

Christine sleeps a few steps away, pushed close to the side of the too-large bed as though the space to splay is offensive—were he laying with her, he would be glued to her back, just as allergic to the distance—and he watches her breathing, the way it disturbs the white-gold of her hair from the part of her lips. The wildness hasn't left her face in these months free of the wood. That fae way about her speaks of something _other_ that tugs at the weakened song, little trills and skips.

She doesn't belong here. He doesn't belong here.

"We should go back." The words—Persian—come as soon as the thought passes through him, whispered low into the not-silence. He means them, even as he thinks of Erik, even as he thinks of the search that brought them here. He means them, even as the guilt nicks at him for it, because the call of wolves in the distance is better than the bark of dogs between the bricks. He sighs, presses a hand over sleep-deprived eyes and pushes against his eyelids before sliding it down to his mouth, fingers in his beard—he's trimmed it back shorter, and that too feels oddly bare. "We should go back."

"After." Swedish, and the song sways with the soft, sluggish tone of it. When he opens his eyes, he finds ice blue fixed to him, understanding and rimmed with contusive weariness. "After Erik."

The guilt nicks a little deeper at the surety of her tone, so positive that the man is somewhere amid the crush and tangle of society, and something deep in him knows the same, but the fatigue is heavy and the twinge of the scar that stretches the length of his upper arm begs for him to set the weight down. His hand is back over his eyes, pressing a little harder until colour blooms behind his eyelids.

"After Erik," he agrees, because he knows the urge to follow won't die, no matter how many winters he spends in that forest, knows that he needs Erik the way he needs Christine—not the same way, not that fated and musical way, but the strength of it is beyond endurance. The guilt is as much aching want as it is guilt.

A carriage passes by, someone yells, and Nadir grimaces at the pang to his temples, eyes opening again, song going sharp just a second, and he sees the flinch in Christine's face as it does. She shakes her head, looks past him to the streetlamp before slipping a hand out from under her pillow.

She beckons, tired smile, and he follows, sliding into bed, pressing close to feel the slender warmth of her, and her hand finds his beard to brush through before it travels down to the side of his neck. It rests there, thumb sweeping over his jaw.

He learns the word for 'soon', breathed as a kiss into his mouth, and he teaches it back to her, song a little stronger and promise firm.


End file.
